LabView failed to be installed on multiple OSes: MacbookPro M1 Pro (2021, Apple Silicon), UTM as virtualization toolbox

[xthomas]

Hello everyone,

Newbie for LabView first. Please bear with me. But after spending 2 days trying to install LabView on Linux and Windows through UTM on my Apple Silicon MacbookPro M1 as well as directly installed on MacOS, I feel very frustrated.

Specifically, when opting in virtualization mode from UTM, I installed both Arm64 Windows 10, 11 and Ubuntu 22.04.

On Windows end, Windows 10 and 11 image can both be installed successfully. I then downloaded the LabView Community Edition 2023 Q3 and 2024 Q1 into the virtual machines. Both versions crashed my Windows OS through blue screen errors: inaccessible boot device. Got stuck as auto-repairing/diagnositics black screens with Win11 spinning wheels.

On Linux, installed Ubuntu Desktops and Server + Desktops separately, the errors I received seem to be incompatibility of supporting arm64 architecture. Not exactly the same errors but something similar as below:

Skipping acquire of configured file 
'restricted/binary-linux-any/Packages' as 
repository 'http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports 
focal-updates InRelease' doesn't support 
architecture 'linux-any'

On MacOS, I installed the mac dmg even though considering that "LabVIEW 2023 Q3 is the final release of LabVIEW for macOS". The error I encountered is "Unable to verify LabVIEW Community Edition entitlement." "Please login to ni.com and redownload LabVIEW Community Edition."

I got frustrated that LabView has such poor compatibility. It seems that it was mainly for Intel/AMD CPUs.

Any chances that I can run LabView with arm64 architecture or through some type of virtualization? Otherwise, I need to get access to a Intel/AMD based computer.

Thank you for your attention, everyone!

[rolfk]

LabVIEW 2023Q3 for Mac is the first and last version that can run natively on Apple ARM silicon.

Linux and Windows versions only support Intel (Linux since 2016 only Intel x64). Trying to run an Intel version on an ARM system is very brittle. It sort of could be made to work with LabVIEW for Mac before 2023 through Rosetta 2 virtualization but did not work very well and this does not allow any hardware access as anything hardware related is not virtualized by Rosetta.

In addition to that did Apple with each new release of MacOS increase the requirements for signing and other security related issues so that older versions of LabVIEW only were possible to be installed with more or less major low level tweaks on the OS level to allow execution of LabVIEW anyhow.

Basically LabVIEW on the Mac was hampered by a lack of paying customers, the fact that MacOS is a continuously moving target for an application like LabVIEW and limited developer resources at NI.

Compare that to Windows: I could install LabVIEW 7.1 on Windows 11 recently and LabVIEW 2022 on Windows 7. On the Mac that has been always very far from possible.